Funding the Commons Forum Berlin

This roundtable discusses the intersection of the network state movement and Web3 communities to uncover, examine, and critique its neo-colonial character. While popup villages, edge cities, and local nodes are perceived as bottom-up initiatives by the Web3 community, their interlinkages with the network state movement evoke a critical perspective. Venture capital-backed network states not only claim territory from nation states in a neo-colonial fashion, they also seek legitimisation through subjecting ocean states to a discourse of exoticism and vulnerabilities. Bringing together scholars from the humanities, event organisers, and Web3 practitioners, this discussion aims to inform the audience with a critical and multifaceted view on the network state movement in and beyond Web3.

This roundtable is a discussion that takes a deeper look at the political and economic realities of building blockchains with technical veterans in the space who will share the realities of it. If blockchains are ideally one of the most resilient technical infrastructures that facilitate economic interaction we have, it’s important to understand how it interplays with the political economic context we live in.

This roundtable is a discussion between Simone Robutti (Tech Workers Coalition), Sam McCarthy (DAOstar and LaborDAO), and Magdalena Ziomek (SMART Coop)where we will discuss the current realities of labor in building out alternatives to exploitative working conditions. Keeping in mind the theme of Adaptive Resilience, we are interested in seeing how alternative labor structures like cooperatives, worker councils and DAOs can or cannot offer more solidaristic relationships with work.